$306,000 penalty for Perth cleaning operators

A Perth cleaning company has been hit with near-record WA
penalties of $306,000 for underpaying workers at a Perth hotel.

Perth man Blagojce Djoneski has been penalised $51,000 and
his company Goldfinger Facility Management Pty Ltd has been
penalised $255,000, in the Federal Circuit Court.

In addition, the Court has ordered the company to rectify
$26,627 in underpayments of six workers it underpaid for various
periods of work in 2014.

The penalties and back-payment order are the result of an
investigation and legal action by the Fair Work
Ombudsman.

In 2014, Djoneski's company had a cleaning contract with
The Melbourne Hotel, located in the Perth CBD, and four of the
underpaid workers were overseas workers that the company supplied
to work as housekeepers at the hotel.

The housekeepers - three from South Korea and one from the
UK - were in Australia on 417 working holiday
visas at the time. Three of them were aged under 25.

They were each paid nothing despite performing between two
and four weeks' work at the hotel, leaving them owed a combined
$9359.

Goldfinger also failed to pay any wages to a fifth
overseas worker - an Indian national employed as a marketing
specialist on a Temporary Business Entry Visa (Class UC) - who was
entitled to more than $4000 for 18 weeks' work.

The sixth underpaid worker - an Australian citizen who was
a general manager at Goldfinger - was paid some wages but was
short-changed more than $13,000.

In his judgment, Judge Antoni Lucev said the
contraventions were "serious" and that the underpayment of the five
overseas workers included "a complete, conscious and deliberate
failure on the part of Goldfinger and Mr Djoneski to pay the
employees at all".

Judge Lucev said there had been "a complete disregard for
Goldfinger's legal obligations as an employer" and there had been
an "absence of any expression of contrition, regret or acceptance
of wrongdoing" from Djoneski and his company.

Judge Lucev also said the underpayment sums "were very
significant to the employees" and that the "the penalty to be
imposed should reflect the deliberate nature of the
contraventions".

The $306,000 in penalties are the second largest secured
by the Fair Work Ombudsman in a Western Australian case.

The largest penalties of $343,860 were secured against
a Perth cleaning company trading as
Housekeeping Pty Ltd and its manager Catherine
Paino-Povey in 2013 for deliberately underpaying
six cleaners, including five overseas workers.

The penalties against Djoneski and his company are also
the seventh largest nationally in any case brought by the Fair Work
Ombudsman, with three of the top seven cases involving a cleaning
business.